Last week I saw this really cool viz from Squawka Football on Twitter and wanted to see if I could rebuild it.

1889 ➡️ 2̶0̶1̶8̶ 2019

Watch the race to become the most successful club in English top-flight history unfold before you. Now updated. pic.twitter.com/4IprWQ16ZT

— Squawka Football (@Squawka) May 13, 2019

Given that this requires animation, I knew I needed a tool that supported this and I turned to Flourish. The data has to be structured in a very specific way, so I downloaded the data from Wikipedia, imported it into Alteryx for a bit of a massage, and spit it back out in the format Flourish required.

And voila! An animated viz of the history of English football champions from 1888-2018. Very little effort required + great animation = win!

Earlier today I saw this really cool viz created by Will Sutton that's an animation of the top home run hitters from 1985-2016.

31 years of MLB Home Runs!
I've seen plenty of these charts lately, so for #MakeoverMonday I wanted to learn how to make my own. Feedback welcome. Thanks, @TriMyData & @VizWizBI R code available here: https://t.co/8ipKQOzmrO #Rstats pic.twitter.com/GreSt6t1b0

— Will Sutton (@WJSutton12) May 6, 2019

As I posted last week, Sophie Sparkes introduced The Data School and me to Flourish. Flourish makes it super simple to create animated visualizations with tons of customization options. Given that Tableau doesn't support animations in the browser, this is a great alternative. Flourish provides an example, you import your data, do a bit of customization and voila! You have an animated viz.

The data needed to be structured with a column for each season, so I prepped the data in Alteryx and I included all seasons from 1912-2018. I then filtered down to players with 250+ career home runs (to make the list manageable).

And here's my animated viz of the top 10 home run hitters of all-time.

Today DS13 was supposed to have most of the day to work on their client project. However, after a training session where I showed them how I approach a new data set and then design a dashboard, we brought Sophie Sparkes in to throw a surprise dashboard week challenge at the team. After all, they only had three days of dashboard week anyway.

Sophie's Challenge

While Tableau is an amazing tool, when you use it all the time you can fall into data-viz-auto-pilot mode. You build the same kinds of charts; you construct similar kinds of dashboards; you fall back on the same formatting styles. While familiarity with tool, and a workflow, is a good thing, it also narrows your view of what’s possible.

For today’s Dashboard Week challenge, I want you to step outside your data viz comfort zones and try building a viz using Flourish. Flourish is a free tool that lets your build interactive, responsive, and embeddable vizzes and data stories, all within the browser using your own data. Flourish is focused at the communication side of data viz (more than the data exploration side), and I’d like DS13 to really think about communication in today’s challenge.

Why Flourish? I really like their wide (and ever expanding) range of templates and interactivity (transitions, stories and ‘Talkies’ to name a few); also they are based in London – so why not viz-local?

Using any part (years, geographic locations, genders) of the England and Wales baby names data sets, I want DS13 to find and communicate one specific story from this data set.

Here are the rules for today, and what I’d like to see as output:

1. They must work independently.
2. Everything must be finished by 5pm.
3. They must use Tableau and Alteryx for the data prep and exploration.
4. The final viz must be made in Flourish.

My Approach

First, I had to get some data. I decided to download the data from the ONS for 1996-2016 because it was in a relatively decent format.

Next, I opened the "Plotting Competitors" example because I loved the animation. The great thing about Flourish is you can immediate use the template. All you need to do is upload your own data, assign the columns, and you're done!